On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 13:06:29 GMT, Cecil Moore
wrote:

I'm talking about the emergency GPS-based system now in
operation. Other ships are automatically notified of
emergencies and given headings for reaching the emergency
location. If the Titanic and California had been so equipped,
the California could probably have gotten there before the
Titanic sank. The GPS-based emergency system doesn't go to
sleep like the California's CW operator did.

Oh, you mean he didn't hear the automatic annunciator they had in use
in those days? Mechanical and clunky, but it worked.

The only thing the GPS-based system does is give you an exact location
- it doesn't notify anyone of anything. Plain old radio does that,
the same as it did back then.

If radio had not existed, the next passing ship would have
rescued any survivors. That's the way it was for centuries
before the invention of radio.

The way it usually was in the centuries before radio (just ask the
crew of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha) was that when the ship sank the
people on her died. (The Atocha's crew were all hardened sailors, yet
only 3 crew members - out of 265 people aboard - clung to the wreckage
long enough to be rescued.)

There were often survivors
in lifeboats waiting to be picked up in the shipping lanes.
Well-equipped lifeboats could survive for weeks in calm
waters as did the ejected sailors of "Bounty" fame.

1) There weren't enough lifeboats in the Titanic.
2) They weren't "equipped".
3) The crew of the bounty were sailors used to pulling oars for hours
at a time. The passengers of the Titanic - those who were allowed to
get to the lifeboats - were pampered women and children, not used to,
or able to, row a heavy wooden lifeboat anywhere.
4) People who are wet and in their night clothes - most of those who
made it to the lifeboats - don't survive very long in sub-Arctic
climes.

But it's nice to reminisce about what happened, even if it never did.